Island of Bones (4 page)

Mrs Westerman’s sister, Rachel, and the Earl of Sussex’s guardian, Mr Graves, tactfully intervened. Such were their skills, the company could convince itself no insult had been offered and the matron’s husband was allowed to return to his discussion of the current sport. The story of the encounter must have spread, however, for no one was seen pressing improving books and quotations on the widow again, at least not when there was any danger of Mr Crowther overhearing.

Harriet heard a snort of contempt from the sofa and looked up again. Crowther was reading the page in front of him with arms extended and lip curled.

‘I conclude you are reading the letter from Paris about the causes of this strange weather we are suffering under.’

‘I am, madam.’ He paused. She remained looking at him. ‘Do you wish to explain your fortunate guess?’

Harriet raised her eyebrows. ‘It was no guess, Crowther. News of the war with the French you read without feeling, news of the court or the arts you do not read at all, news of death or crime you read with weary disdain. Only an individual offering conclusions you think faulty in the natural sciences could rouse you to anger.’

Crowther looked back down at the paper in front of him, and said sullenly, ‘I have reason to be angry. This correspondent begins well enough. Listen: “
The multitude therefore may be easily supposed to draw strange
conclusions when they see the sun of a blood colour shed a melancholy light and cause a most sultry heat
”. Very well, and so they may do – but so does this man. To leap from there to “
This, however, is nothing more than a very natural effect from a hot sun after a long succession of heavy rain
,” is nonsense. Any child knows a damp fog. This summer has nothing of that in it.’

Harriet stood from her desk and moved towards the French windows that gave her a view of the lawns and shrubbery to the west of the house, putting her hand to the base of her spine. The grass looked yellow and feeble. She felt this summer that her home was becoming small and pinched after the pleasant cool of spring. She was breathless, confined, and there was no clean air; the season seemed to pant with its little hot winds and lash out with sudden lightning like a child with a fever.

‘It has been a foul month, with the heat, and this dry wind that seems to parch the leaves and claps the doors, but gives no relief from this mist.’ She turned away from the window and began to walk up and down the length of the salon. ‘I have had three workers collapse in the heat, yet the sun itself is hardly visible. If you scorn this gentleman’s explanation, what is your own?’

Crowther shrugged. ‘Because I cannot give you an alternative does not mean I have to swallow any pap that is offered to me. However, accounts of earthquakes in Italy this year make me suspect that the matter thrown up from the earth on such occasions may be the cause. Think of this sulphurous tang in the air.’

Harriet paused in her walking and sniffed the air above her head a moment before replying, ‘True. Mrs Heathcote believes it to be the smell of the Devil come out from Hell to breathe on the land. She tells me so every morning when she gives me my coffee, and complains that the brass fittings of the house are tarnishing as quickly as she can make the maids polish them. But can foreign earthquakes also produce the storms we have been victim to?’

Crowther buried his chin in his chest. ‘We English
must
make such a mystery of our weather. There are storms every year, yet we always
think them harbingers of the Apocalypse and act as if we saw lightning for the first time. Because two things happen at once does not mean they originate from the same cause.’

Harriet put her hand to her forehead. ‘They have been unusually severe, but very well, sir. I shall not hide under the altar of the church as yet. But if someone gave me a witching cure for this weather, I would try it. It pushes me down so, Crowther. I feel as if I am carrying a body across my shoulders every step I take. Yet I must always seem cheerful.’ She noticed he was looking at her from under his hooded lids with careful attention. She restarted her walk and said in a lighter tone, ‘But tell me what has caused you to come to us in such an unpleasant mood this morning.’

He put the paper down. ‘I had the pleasure of seeing my house pointed out to a party of pleasure-seekers this morning, and found myself, in my own parlour, being identified as a curiosity of the area like a bearded woman at the county fair.’

She turned again on the carpet and her skirts rippled, falling over themselves in an attempt to keep pace with her. ‘You
are
a curiosity, Crowther,’ she said, folding her arms across her bodice. ‘You should have waved your scalpel at them. They would have drunk all of the best brandy at the Bear and Crown to recover their nerves and you could have charged Michaels a commission on the sales.’

She dropped into a seat opposite him with a rustle of silk and leaned back, trying to pull the warm air of the room into her lungs. Her conscience was still a little troubled by her role in forcing Crowther out of seclusion. Three years previously, she had persuaded him to become involved in her enquiries into the affairs of Thornleigh Hall. There had been deaths, and Crowther’s own history of family scandal had been thrown into the light and picked over in the newspapers. Yet they had managed to protect the current Earl and his sister, and seen them take possession of the Hall in the care of their guardians. It had cost them both, and neither were the people they once had been, but she could not regret those decisions made.

‘Yet
we
are fortunate. Graves and Mrs Service have to allow parties of ladies and gentlemen through Thornleigh Hall half the days of the week and watch them examining the floorboards for bloodstains.’

‘Let them lock the gates then.’

‘Crowther,’ Harriet said, ‘how could they? It is their duty to be stared at.’

Crowther’s further thoughts on the troubles suffered by the Earl of Sussex’s family were lost as the door to the salon opened and Mrs Heathcote entered with a letter on a tray. She presented it to the gentleman rather abruptly. Mrs Heathcote had been housekeeper of Caveley since its purchase, and regarded both Mrs Westerman and her sister as a good pair of girls who only needed proper managing. It was a sign that he was accepted almost as part of the family that she now regarded Mr Crowther in a similar light.

‘There we have found you, Mr Crowther! An express arrived for you and Hannah thought you would have come here, you having left your own house in such a temper, and so she has brought it along. I would offer you coffee, but it has such a stimulating effect. Perhaps you had better have some of Miss Rachel’s Nerve Drops until you are in a better humour. Now, will you take your dinner here, or must Hannah have something by for your convenience?’

Crowther realised he had probably been brusque with Hannah, his own housekeeper, before he left his home and recognised that he was now being punished for it. He took the letter and unfolded it, trying to ignore both Harriet’s stifled laugh and Mrs Heathcote’s stony gaze.

‘I can forego the drops, Mrs Heathcote,’ he said, with his eyes cast down. ‘My thanks and apologies to Hannah. I shall dine here, if I am welcome.’

Harriet waved her hand with a smile and Mrs Heathcote, encouraged by this display of Crowther’s improved manners, nodded. ‘There now. Very good, sir. You know she has enough to manage at the moment.’ With that she swept out of the room like a 40-gun frigate under full sail.

When the door closed Harriet laughed hard enough to bring tears into her eyes while Crowther read his express. When she had recovered sufficiently she asked: ‘What extra work are you giving poor Hannah, Crowther? Has she finally begun to regret entering your service?’

‘At times, I am sure she has,’ he replied, continuing to read. ‘I have had several samples from London arrive in a despoiled state due to the heat. They had lost all interest scientifically and I am informed the smell of decay was very difficult to remove from the drapery.’

This confession was enough to send Harriet into a further fit of laughter, so it was some time before she could ask what was the matter of the letter Crowther held in his hand. His reply soon quieted her. His expression was rather wondering, his eyebrows lifted, and he reread the message with his head tilted to one side, as if unsure of what he was seeing on the paper in front of him.

‘I am requested, and the invitation is extended to yourself, to go into the Lake Country near Keswick. My sister, the Vizegräfin Margaret von Bolsenheim, is staying in our former home with her son as guests of the current owner. And they have found a body.’

Harriet left Crowther shortly afterwards to dress for dinner, and to inform her sister that she intended to journey immediately into Cumberland. The invitation had delighted her. She had never seen that part of the country, and in the heat her household duties had become ever more irksome and confining. Yet every pleasure had a price on it. In this case the price was, she was certain, about to be extracted by her sister.

Rachel Trench was the darling of the neighbourhood. A paragon of everything a young woman should be, she was pretty and charming with a lively manner that never went beyond what was proper to her situation in life. She read novels, but did not talk about them too much. She appreciated music and sang rather well, but never gave long displays of her talent. Only her somewhat unusual sister was regarded as a slight blot and some had worried that even Miss Trench’s excellent character
might be tainted by sharing a home with her so long. However, in 1780, the year that Harriet had first forced her acquaintance on Crowther, Rachel had met a young and very handsome lawyer from Pulborough by the name of Daniel Clode. He had had some share in the adventures of the family since that time and had been present in Captain Westerman’s last moments. The mutual affection between Rachel and Daniel had been plain throughout, and when Harriet put off her mourning clothes, their engagement was announced. The neighbourhood breathed a sigh of relief. Some thought that perhaps Miss Trench might have found a better match, but all agreed it was best that she be removed from Caveley. Mr Clode came from nowhere, his parents were barely respectable, but now he handled so much business for the estate of the Earl of Sussex, he was more and more noticed in society, and it was hoped marriage to Rachel might put the final polish on him.

Rachel, while modest about her own qualities and proud of her sister’s bravery, was painfully aware of local opinion. Harriet knew she did not worry on her own account, or not greatly, but rather was concerned about her nephew and niece, and wondered what effect their mother’s reputation might have on their prospects. Harriet found the burden of this rather wide-eyed concern intensely irritating. Particularly because, as Crowther had occasionally pointed out to her, her temper was always more likely to fly when she felt herself in the wrong. Harriet knew it hurt Rachel to see her the subject of any number of lurid pamphlets, and it made her tremble to be introduced as ‘the sister of
the
Mrs Westerman’. It was unlikely, therefore, she would welcome the news that Harriet intended to abandon her household on a moment’s notice and travel hundreds of miles to view a corpse.

Harriet found Rachel in her chamber writing a letter. Harriet suspected it was to her fiancé. She was happy to see that their affection – for it was an acknowledged love match – was so warm that although they met every other day, their letters still flowed back and forth. Fixing on the correspondence as a chance to delay mentioning her trip, Harriet asked what was the subject of her letter.

Rachel smiled at her sister and said briskly, ‘Daniel is eager to set a date for our marriage. I write to ask him to be patient.’

‘Why, for heaven’s sake?’ asked Harriet. ‘The household is out of mourning. Marry him as soon as you may. I have always thought late September a fine time for a wedding. Then you may spend your first winter locked up together before you have had time to tire of each other’s company.’

Rachel put down her pen. ‘I hope I may never tire of his company.’ She crossed to the armchair where her sister was seated and took her place at her feet, reaching up for her hands and taking them between her own. Harriet looked down at her, more golden in her colouring where she was red, and wondered unkindly if her looks would fade as she aged. ‘But Harry, I cannot leave you alone yet. Little Anne is so young and I know you miss James still. And Stephen will be going away to school soon. You are used to having people about you. I shall ask Daniel to wait a year or two longer. He will understand.’

Harriet removed her hands and frowned into the carpet. ‘Rachel, I shall miss my husband every day until my death. If you put off your marriage for that reason, you and Daniel will die of old age before I am done grieving.’ She waited a moment till she could be sure her voice was steady again. ‘You are not even leaving Hartswood, for goodness sake. I know Clode has made enquiries about the Mansel House in the village – Michaels told me. Once you have returned from your wedding trip we shall meet every day. Crowther is often here, and the family from Thornleigh. Do not play the martyr out of pity for me.’

‘But Harry . . .’

‘Set the date, Rachel. But I fear I shall have no time to assist in the arrangements for some time. Crowther and I leave for Cumberland in the morning. His sister has discovered a desiccated corpse there and we mean to go and see it.’

Rachel flushed. ‘This is some joke!’

Harriet smiled tightly. ‘No joke at all. We are invited by Mrs Briggs, the most respectable owner of Silverside Hall. I have never seen the
Lake Country and yet I am constantly being told how charming it is. Do you remember when the Rollinsons went there last summer? All the women in the family were driven into verse by its charms. I only wish they had confined themselves to nature poetry rather than composing odes on the anniversary of James’s murder. As for the other matter, I have never seen a desiccated corpse before either. It has all the novelty of the landscape, and there is no danger of it inspiring poetry – a great advantage. Someone took the trouble to place it in a tomb, you know. Someone else’s tomb, I mean. On an island. It’s most intriguing.’